All essays
Every issue of Liftoff Asia. New essay every Wednesday.
Four days at Thailand Space Expo. A university payload home from the ISS, a hall full of people who build satellites, and the region's first space fund out raising money.
Shirley Saw 
Japan's space industry grew out of a loop: the government funds the research, a startup forms around it, and the government becomes the customer. Synspective shows the whole thing.
Shirley Saw 
When Rocket Lab delayed Neutron over voids in a carbon-composite tank dome, my first instinct was that this was Asia's opening. That instinct was wrong, and the real composites opportunity is next door.
Shirley Saw 
Asia did 212 deals in the year to June 2026. Europe did 136. North America still took most of the money — and in Southeast Asia, the cheques are still mostly government.
Shirley Saw 
Six rounds closed in two weeks across China, India and Japan, and three of them were never written up in English. A new series putting the actual cheques on the page.
Shirley Saw 
Asked in Parliament what its new space agency is actually for, Singapore's answer named two things: urban planning and port operations. What I found was a country buying orbit to run an island.
Shirley Saw 
Satellite sensors improve about 100x per generation; the radios that send the pictures home improve 3-5x. So satellites photograph more than they can transmit and delete the rest. The fix, and the two things standing in the way.
Shirley Saw 
Kazakhstan owns the world's largest spaceport and leases most of it to Russia until 2050. Its space regulator now sits inside a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence. And the licensing route for a private space company has been open since 2016 — this month, a small team in Almaty used it.
Shirley Saw 
China's new Five-Year Plan adds space to its list of pillar industries. What that means, how China actually ships these plans, and where Asia shows up.
Shirley Saw 
Indonesia couldn't lay cable across 17,000 islands, so it launched a 150 Gbps satellite and pointed it at the schools and clinics the internet forgot. The quiet lesson about where space money actually goes.
Shirley Saw 
Southeast Asia builds satellites but has never launched one — they all ride foreign rockets. Equatorial Space, now inside Thailand's FastPass program, wants to change that with a non-explosive fuel made in Singapore. An exclusive look at founder Simon Gwozdz's company, and why a government, an investor, and a customer should all care.
Shirley Saw 
A top deep-tech VC, Alexandra Vidyuk of Beyond Earth Ventures, breaks down the exact machine a country needs to turn university research into companies — the seven parts, what Singapore gets right, and what the rest of Southeast Asia can work on.
Shirley Saw 
Vietnam has one of the most capable satellites in Southeast Asia — and it can't get to orbit. Why the region builds and operates its own satellites but still depends on bigger partners to fly them, and the companies trying to change that.
Shirley Saw 
Barred from the world's space station by a US law, China built its own from scratch. It's a fifth the size — and it just set the record for the longest spacewalk in history. What Tiangong is made of, what it's done, and what China wants to do with it next — plus a video from the Hong Kong Space Museum.
Shirley Saw 
On 18 July, Skyroot's Vikram-1 became the first privately built Indian rocket to reach orbit — first try. The founders started the company in 2018, before India had any law permitting private launch. The story of how India got here, who paid for it, and why one small rocket points at a $44B space economy.
Shirley Saw 
A space event in Hong Kong, full of financiers, lawyers and family offices instead of rocket engineers. Hong Kong isn't trying to launch anything — it's pointing finance, insurance, law, logistics and education at the space economy. Five doors in, none of which need an engineering degree.
Shirley Saw 
Cheap reusable launch made space 97% cheaper — a tide that lifted every boat. But Asia's contribution was never the rocket; it's the rovers, the sample-return science, the navigation backbones and the talent the cheaper rocket now carries. What the region actually builds in space — and the one thing it still can't do.
Shirley Saw 
In February, sixteen days apart, China's Long March 10 flew for the first time and NASA pushed its crewed landing to 2028. A progress audit of both lunar programmes — hardware, budgets, timelines — and the single crater rim they're both aiming at.
Shirley Saw 
On June 12, JAXA flew the H3-30S — three liquid engines, zero solid boosters, roughly half the price of the H-IIA it replaces and pitched at Falcon 9 parity. Japan's cheap-launch play, top-down from the flagship, while India runs the same race bottom-up with Skyroot and the SSLV. Two models of cheap, and what each means for Asian payloads.
Shirley Saw 
Dr. Bidushi Bhattacharya read the commercial space boom from inside NASA's JPL a decade early, then moved to Singapore and built AstroHub — the people-layer the sector was missing. Her career is a playbook for founders, investors, and anyone reading where space goes next.
Shirley Saw 
Meet Nicholas Barnett — cotton chipper, oil and gas, lunar PhD. He and co-founder Andrew Hazelton run Interstellar Mapping (lunar geospatial intelligence) and Interstellar Innovation (lunar regolith simulants). Two companies building the decision and de-risking layer of the Asian lunar economy.
Shirley Saw 
Three Asian countries already have hardware on the lunar surface. One has an orbiter active. A working brief on the layers of the Asian lunar economy, the gaps where new entrants get in, and what to do about each — for investors, founders, policymakers, and corporates.
Shirley Saw 
Singapore consolidated. Malaysia multiplied. And one of Malaysia's three spaceport projects just attracted serious attention from Beijing. A field report from Asia Tech x Singapore 2026.
Shirley Saw 
Artemis II just looped the Moon and broke a 56-year distance record. The bigger story: every Asian country is quietly picking a side in the next Moon race.
Shirley Saw 
A region is quietly building the next layer of orbital infrastructure. Why almost nobody — in Asia or out of it — is writing about it.
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